Published 12 April 2025
Letter from Dr Deirdre Little MCCS, DRANZCOG, FACRRM – OBSTETRICS.
This letter was sent to the Premier Chris Minns on behalf
of the Catholic Women’s League of which Deirdre is National Bioethics Convenor
– Deirdre is also an Advisor to FLI.
CWLAInc Letter to Premier the Hon. Chris Minns
The Honourable Chris Minns MP
Dear Premier,
Catholic women and their families throughout NSW and indeed Australia are gravely concerned about the Abortion Law Reform Amendment Bill 2025.
This Bill would:
- Adversely impact patient safety;
- Remove effective conscientious objection and health workers who hold it;
- Antagonise healthcare workers;
- Promote rushed and less thought through crisis-mode decisions with lasting impacts of grief and regret;
- Promote abortion procedures but fail to provide, and indeed remove, counselling assistance for the mother;
- Remove input to mothers of qualified personnel trained to identify domestic violence and coercion;
- Makes no provision for care of mothers who change their mind after receiving poor or uncounselled medication.
Shortly before introducing this bill, abortionist and Greens member MLC Dr Amanda Cohn stated her experience as an abortion provider was one of ‘joy and empowerment’. (Legislative Council Hansard November 13th, 2024). Dr. Cohn MLC has brought her joy in aborting and ending the lives of the weakest members of Australian society into our House of Government and into Hansard. CWLA condemn the parliamentary insertion of the tragedy and cruelty of killing as constituting joy to be highly offensive.
Re the above listed concerns
- Catholic women, including mothers and grandmothers collect experiences across generations and across the country. We ourselves hold many occupations in nursing, medicine, allied health and pharmacy. There is a depth of medical training, skill and experience in doctors that is not provided in the differing formation of other health providers.
Lesser trained personnel and personnel less experienced in reproductive health care who may instead complete an online module on abortion provision, will lack the depth of experience these conflicted, stressed and sometimes traumatized mothers may require. These mothers are in crisis. They need skilled professional help before and after medical and surgical termination of pregnancy. Both medical and surgical abortion can be complicated by coercion, fear, anxiety, domestic violence, depression, drug use and other medical conditions prior to abortion consultation, and by haemorrhage, severe pain, sepsis, incompletion, and exacerbated fear, anxiety, grief, illicit drug use, depression and violence etc after the abortion. Only medical practitioners are adequately trained and experienced to optimally recognize and manage these conditions.
- Section 9 of this Bill goes far beyond previous legislation. It goes well beyond a Pregnancy Choices hotline or website. It would compel registered health practitioners to comply with requests for abortion by making an effective and early abortion referral. Many will not comply. Many have a conscientious objection, and commitment to truth and life that cannot be negated by legislation. One of our convenors is a rural GP obstetrician who will not comply with this Bill if passed and will cease work.
Resignations and de-registrations of health professionals will follow.
This will further deplete rural and regional hospitals of health care workers. A recent death in a rural hospital (Tenterfield) was attributed to the absence of a doctor to review an in-patient for four consecutive days. If further GP VMOs are lost or removed from hospital work by this Amendment Bill, rural health care will rapidly further decline. Much work rests on the shoulders of these few rural hospital VMOs. They are already a small group.
Those who remain will experience moral distress.
- This Bill will socially divide health care workers. Professional health care providers who object to the intrusion of government into conscience to mandate killing arrangements will naturally align, and those who have no problem with this will form another separate and identifiable group. This would affect hospital cohesion, collaboration and teamwork.
- The ready referral for abortion required by the Bill will expedite decisions that are best not made in crisis mode. Time to discuss, consider, and receive appropriate counselling may be sidelined in the process of handing over directly to an abortionist. Abortionists are not counsellors or psychologists. Time must be used in this important interval to determine and seek out possible other choices so as to ensure valid informed consent is present.
- Expanding the provision of abortion providers from among the possible 16 categories of registered health personnel, including nurses, will expand abortion provision into occupations that are not trained in counselling, nor in discerning coercion, nor in recognizing diagnostic categories of anxiety and depression, or any other contexts that may preclude valid informed consent.
- Domestic Violence has been observed as a common accompaniment of both unplanned unwanted pregnancies and of abortion-seeking. A routine process of placing abortion in the hands of a mere efficient referral process will not have capacity to identify vulnerable women, or properly manage this sad and potentially dangerous situation.
- Inadequate preparation prior to abortion, conducted in a rushed mode by lesser skilled health workers, will likely lead to abortion regret and grief. It has been demonstrated that one in three women regret their abortion decision within 8 weeks of having the abortion. This phenomenon will likely affect many more women under the proposed Amendment Bill. The Bills proposal to cease data collection will obscure observation and measurement of this occurrence and of the emotional, mental and physical consequences, which the laxity and recklessness of this Bill facilitates.
Catholic Women’s League Australia abhor this extreme Bill. We abhor its foreseeable effects on Australian women and their children, and on healthcare throughout regional and rural NSW and beyond. Appropriate persons and groups were not consulted in the formation of this Bill.
CWLAInc request an Inquiry be held by the NSW Parliament in the Legislative Council so that current healthcare workers, hospital staff, regional and rural communities, other medical Colleges such as the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, hospital staff and other stakeholders can present relevant information and respond to claims – many unevidenced – made in the statuary review report.
Yours sincerely
